


after the rain

by HereComeDatBoi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marriage, Remarriage, Shiro and Curtis supporting each other, Widowerhood, kind of, not really but kind of, they're soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:55:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21754729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereComeDatBoi/pseuds/HereComeDatBoi
Summary: Shiro and Curtis spend the day at home, side by side on their narrow sofa with mementos and photographs spread out in front of them. They put a slice of strawberry cake under Allura’s portrait, and Shiro burns a stick of incense for the five pilots in the class of '31 who died during the invasion. Curtis would have gone to Mass, but since this Remembrance Day falls in the middle of the week he decides to do a gije ceremony for Seok-jin instead—at least until he looks at his old wedding ring and bursts into tears over his pot of rice cakes, as Shiro himself still does too often when someone mentions Adam’s name in passing.“It’s okay, honey,” he whispers, heart shattering in half as he pulls Curtis away from the stove and leads him toward their living room. “I miss him, too.”----Every April 24th, the Garrison holds a memorial for the soldiers and civilians lost during the war.For two widowed officers who found love in each other, it's one of the most painful days of the year.
Relationships: Curtis/Shiro (Voltron), past Adam/Shiro (Voltron) - Relationship
Comments: 15
Kudos: 23





	after the rain

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The Seok-jin mentioned here is not a reference to the late animator who worked on Voltron and passed away last year, but to the character named after him who was introduced in Season 8 in Day Forty-Seven.

The Garrison gives the students and faculty a day off on April 24th, in honor of the first wave of fighter pilots that fell against Sendak’s fleet and the three thousand civilians who were killed in the months immediately after. Some of the students go home to see their families, and others sign out jeeps and hoverbikes for the day to go visit the only resting place their families will ever know—the mass grave a few miles north of Maricopa, where all the bodies that were disfigured past recognition in the invasions were buried or burned after reconstruction began. To date, Shiro has never visited it, not even to be present at the odd late cremations that happen as the rebuilding goes on; the odor of human flesh charring away to ash seems like a part of his very skin sometimes, and even catching sight of the Garrison crematorium from a distance is usually enough to bring it back to him. 

Curtis has never seen the grave either, though his reasons for keeping away are more practical. His family is all accounted for, whether dead or alive, and there is nowhere to go when he wants to visit  _ his  _ late husband; Seok-jin died on a research mission, and his downed spacecraft is lost in a far-flung system where not even the Atlas will ever be able to reach it. 

Instead of participating in the official memorial events, Shiro and Curtis spend Remembrance Day in their little apartment, side by side on their narrow sofa with mementos and photographs spread out in front of them. They put a slice of strawberry cake under Allura’s portrait (strawberries were her favorite Earthen food, after sushi) and Shiro sets a glass of water in front of his framed picture of the class of ‘31 and burns a stick of incense for the five pilots in his year who died in the invasion: Nayoung Park, Pieter Janssen, Phyllis and Philippa Ainsley, and Wuxian Yang. Curtis  _ would  _ have gone to Mass, but since this Remembrance Day falls in the middle of the week he decides to do a  _ gije  _ ceremony for Seok-jin instead—at least until he catches sight of his old wedding ring and bursts into tears over his pot of rice cakes, as Shiro himself still does too often when someone mentions Adam’s name in passing. 

“It’s okay, honey,” he whispers, heart shattering in half as he pulls Curtis away from the stove and leads him toward their living room. “I miss him, too.”

Curtis nods and blows his nose on a napkin, resting his head against Shiro’s left shoulder as their eyes travel as one to  _ their  _ wedding picture, hanging on the opposite wall in a frame painted white and silver. 

“I don’t even have a reason to mourn today,” he says bleakly, his blue eyes softening as they drift a little further to the black-and-white photograph Shiro keeps of his wedding to Adam. “Seok-jin was supposed to be traveling home from the Atlas, it wasn’t even...well, you know.”

“Doesn’t make it any easier,” Shiro sighs, picking up the little wooden fame and tracing Adam’s gaunt face with a gentle finger. “Adam didn’t go today either, remember?”

“Yeah, I do.” 

They’re silent for a little while longer, studying the three pictures of their collective three weddings with tears trickling down their faces. Remembrance Day is always especially hard for Curtis; he and Seok-jin were married long before the war, and Shiro still remembers coming back from his Kuiper mission in 2133 to find out that Officer Curtis Bradley had finally become Officer Curtis  _ Jang.  _ He only ever knew either of them in passing—they were a good three years older and rarely moved in the same social circles he and Adam once frequented, but it was clear to him even then that Seok-jin had loved Curtis with every fiber of his being—and that Curtis loved him just as desperately in return. 

“I wish I’d gotten the chance to know him, sometimes.”

“Hm?” wonders Curtis, turning to face him fully. “Why, ‘Kashi?”

“You and Seok-jin were actually the reason I came out,” Shiro admits. It was terrifying to say it the first few times; the words  _ I’m gay  _ tasted like ash in his mouth when he was fourteen, and it wasn’t until Matt cheerily announced that he was bisexual at breakfast one day that Shiro actually told him. “Everyone heard about Seok-jin buying silk flowers at the craft store and asking you to prom that one year, so I...I realized that maybe being gay wasn’t as scary as I thought. If he hadn’t done that, I don’t know if I would ever have really been okay with it—and then I’d have tried to tell Adam I liked him without even telling him I liked boys at all.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Curtis kisses his forehead and then the tip of his nose, holding his hands in a vice grip as Shiro hugs him around the waist. “You would’ve figured it out eventually. I was there too, once.”

“It wouldn’t really have mattered, because Adam was sure enough for the both of us,” muses Shiro, smiling at the sight of Adam’s brown cheek pressed to his in the picture. “He never questioned himself, ever. At first he didn’t really know that being pan was a thing, but he just accepted that he was different and left it at that. He knew who he was, and that was enough.”

“That’s what helped Keith figure himself out too, right?”

“Mhm, it was. Keith had a crush on Lance back then, and he told Adam about it when he was maybe...sixteen, I think? It never went anywhere, of course, but still.”

“I was going to be surprised that Keith said anything to him, but to be honest I’ve never known a kid that  _ didn’t  _ trust Adam,” Curtis says slowly. “You know, my first real memory of you was of you laughing at Matt because Pidge wanted Adam to carry her and not him.”

“Really?” Shiro doesn’t remember this at all, somehow. “When?”

“One of the family visiting days, probably? It was right before I got my certification, so I was still living in the dorms, and then I saw you three walking down the hallway with the Holts. Adam was tossing Pidge up and down in his arms, and Matt was trying to get her to go to him instead. But then she climbed onto Adam’s shoulders and squeaked for everyone to hear that she didn’t want him or Officer Holt to carry her anymore because Adam was the tallest.”

“Oh, Katie was  _ smitten  _ with Adam,” laughs Shiro, memory briefly flashing back to Pidge making a beeline to a power outlet with a plastic fork when she was around two. “She always wanted to sit on his lap, and she  _ hated  _ it when he had a secret and didn’t want to tell her. And she used to cry when anyone called her “baby,” back then, but when she was around five she cried if Adam called her anything else. That and Katie-kitten, those were her favorites.

“He would have made an  _ amazing  _ dad,” he whispers, closing his eyes and covering them with his fingers in an effort to keep himself from crying again. “You know, he wanted to adopt a couple of kids after Keith, back before the war—but then we decided it wouldn’t be right, because of my dystrophy. And then we found him and Mishaal stranded all alone on that cruiser, and I thought—I thought we could squeeze everything he wanted into the time he had left, but he said we couldn’t. He didn’t want to bring a baby home and then have them lose  _ another  _ parent, so...so he never got that. 

“I was—oh God, Curt, you don’t even know what I was like after I got diagnosed. I was determined to cram a lifetime into what, ten years? Adam was trying to pull me back, he told me—he told me that  _ everything  _ was worth it, not just my career, and I wouldn’t  _ listen.  _ And when Juliana told him he had a year, maybe two, he just—all he wanted was to spend that year with me. I was enough for  _ him  _ when he was  _ dying of radiation sickness, _ and before that I spent almost half a decade making him feel like he  _ wasn’t enough for me. _ ”

“Takashi,  _ honey,  _ it’s not your—”

“It is,” Shiro says hollowly. “Adam...he asked me to bring him back to his grandfather at the end, remember? So I did—me and Matt and Keith and Pidge, we flew him home to Shindola so he could go with his family near him, and once we got him there he didn’t even last the night. But then his grandfather wouldn’t let me take him, after—he spat in my face and screamed that I’d as good as murdered his grandson, as if killing his  _ son  _ hadn’t been enough.”

“What?” breathes Curtis, horrified. “Surely he didn’t think  _ you _ —and what do you mean, he wouldn’t let you take Adam?”

“H-he ripped him out of my arms right after the doctor signed the D.C.—and then he said he would kill me if I ever set foot on his property again, and burned Adam about thirty feet away from the house.”

Shiro squeezes his eyes shut. 

“And the worst part is, he was right,” he whispers. “Seok-jin dying wasn’t anyone’s fault, it—it just  _ happened,  _ like the  _ Columbia  _ and the first two Saturn missions. But Adam’s gone because he loved me, because I wanted him to stay in the country after we graduated. He was only still at the Garrison when the Galra came because he knew that I was alive, that I’d come back here. It  _ is  _ my fault, because—because it couldn’t have been anyone else’s. Sendak wasn’t interested in the regions he couldn’t use for manufacturing, so...if Adam just went home, he’d have made it. The only reason he didn’t was because of me.”

Curtis holds him close, and Shiro can read a different kind of assurance in the touch—the promise that Adam was the bravest man either of them have ever known, saving Mishaal’s life when they were taken prisoner during the invasion and then every day after that when he took on her shifts in the nuclear facility they were assigned to. Both of them made it back home eventually, but not even the healing pods left behind after the Castle’s destruction could do anything for Adam—the degree of radiation poisoning he suffered was beyond repair in the end, and when he heard the news he accepted it without so much as a murmur.

“He wasn’t afraid,” Curtis tells him with a hint of steel in his voice. “He knew what he was doing, Takashi—he knew they both couldn’t walk out of there alive, so he did the best he could. You  _ know  _ that, right?”

Shiro nods. He does know; Adam’s sacrifice is the only reason Mishaal is still alive, the only reason her newborn son with Matt exists, the only reason Nadia Rizavi didn’t drink herself to death after it finally sank in that her entire family was gone. Shiro will never suffer a sibling’s loss himself, but he remembers what Hunk went through when he thought his sisters had been murdered in the invasion—and try as he might, he cannot forget that only nine of the ten pilots lost on that horrible day were actually shot down; the tenth, Phyllis, flattened herself against a Galra cruiser at roughly thirty-three hundred kilometers an hour the moment she realized Philippa was dead. 

“Adam didn’t just save Mishaal,” he croaks. “Matt was falling apart, and Nadia...you remember Kinkade had her committed to the care ward twice? They were in pieces, all three of them, and now...now they have a chance to actually live in the world they helped save.”

Curtis nods. “He would never have chosen differently, sweetheart. And he would never have thought it was your fault, either.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I  _ know  _ so.”

Shiro looks down at the picture of his late husband and meets his frozen dark eyes, breaking all over again at how sick Adam had looked on their wedding day—but then he sees the resolve in the thin arms wrapped around his neck and the utter joy in Adam’s face, and then the undeniable truth of Curtis’s words. 

“You’re right,” he sighs, leaning closer to Curtis and kissing the hand crowned with Seok-jin’s gold wedding ring—the right hand, since Curtis wears Shiro’s ring on the left. “I’m being stupid.”

“Not stupid,  _ schatz, _ ” Curtis corrects gently. “There’s no such thing as being stupid on days like this.”

“I know, I know. It just...doesn’t feel like that, sometimes.”

They’re quiet for a few more minutes, and then—

“Do you still want to do the  _ gije  _ for Seok-jin? I’ll help you cook, and light the candles with you, and...if you want me to, I mean. It helps me, not doing the memorials alone, so I thought…”

His husband leans down and kisses him again, once on the mouth and twice on the unruly tuft of hair which after two changes in color and thirty-five years is just as wild as ever. “I do want you to, ‘Kashi. Very much, if you’re feeling okay to.”

“I’m always okay for you,  _ koisshi. _ ”

“You don’t have to be, darling. You know that.”

“But I  _ want  _ to be. You’re my husband, and I love you.”

“And I love you, too,” Curtis answers, with all his heart in his voice. “But you’d better not burn the rice cakes if I leave you alone with them, got it?”

“Oh, you—I would  _ never _ ! God, a man sets a pot of oatmeal on fire just  _ one  _ time—”

“It wasn’t just one time. It was three, and I have photographic evidence.”

_ “Hey!”  _ Shiro objects. “That isn’t fair.”

“Why are you booing me, starlight? I’m right.”

“This isn’t the time for stale memes, husband-of-mine. Hand me that spoon, and I’ll show you how well I can make rice cakes.”

“I’m  _ trusting  _ you, Takashi.”

_ “Curtis!” _


End file.
